A President’s Day Guide to Better Tweeting

Since I don’t need any new sheets or pillow cases, I’m not going to completely take President’s Day off but, since it’s a federal holiday, I am going to take it a little bit easy by borrowing some content for this post.

As you may know, in addition to this blog I also write a weekly newsletter about top 40 radio for Billboard (If you are interested in receiving it you can sign up here). In last week’s edition I included an item about the results of a new survey of Twitter users that I found in this Marketing Profs article.

Seeing as it’s been a few days since the Billboard piece ran, I think it’s probably ok to repurpose some thoughts on the findings here. Plus, it’s President’s Day and President Obama does have a Twitter account. So without further adieu or thin premises, here are some of the results of a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, and Georgia Tech:

Be Unique: One of the findings is that information gets stale quickly on Twitter. Since you can’t be faster than the rest of the world add something unique to the conversation. That will make your tweets stand out.

Be Compelling: Just like your on air content your tweets need to be compelling. Don’t whine and don’t posting pictures of the sandwich you are about to eat. If you opened the mic and started whining about how hard your life is or about a great meal you are looking forward to people would tune out.

Keep it Tight: The length of a tweet is just like the length of a break or a woman’s skirt. Long enough to cover the subject but short enough to keep it interesting. Even though you have 140 characters for a tweet, you don’t have to use all of them.